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“I am not at all surprised to hear you call me a plaything.” Her mouth twisted. “But I was never yours.”
“A fact you made abundantly clear five years ago,” he said drily, though he doubted she would mistake the edge beneath. Indeed, she stiffened. “But is this any way for old friends to greet each other after such a long time?” He crossed the room until only the flimsy barrier of her desk stood between them.
“Friends?” she echoed, shaking her head slightly. “Is that what we are?”
Only a few feet separated them, not even the length of his arm. She swallowed, nervously. Tariq smiled. It was as he remembered. She still looked the same—copper curls and cinnamon eyes, freckles across her nose and a wicked, suggestive mouth made entirely for sin. And she was still susceptible to him, even from across a desk. Would she still burn them both alive when he touched her? He couldn’t wait to find out.
“What do you suggest?” she asked. Her delicate eyebrows arched up, and that sensual mouth firmed. “Shall we nip out for a coffee? Talk about old times? I think I’ll pass.”
“I am devastated,” he said, watching her closely. “My former lovers are generally far more receptive.”
She didn’t like that. The flush in her cheeks deepened, and her cinnamon eyes darkened. She stood straighter.
“Why are you here, Tariq?” she asked, in a crisp, nononsense voice that both irritated and aroused him. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Are you looking to let a flat in the York area? If so, you’ll want to return when the agents are in, so they might help you. I’m afraid they’re both out with clients, and I’m only the office manager.”
“Why do you think I’m here, Jessa?”
He studied her face, letting the question hang there between them. He wanted to see her reaction. To catalog it. Her fingers crept to her throat, as if she wanted to soothe the beat of her own pulse.
“I cannot imagine any reason at all for you to be here,” she told him now, but her voice was high and reedy. She coughed to cover it, and then threw her shoulders back, as if she fancied herself a match for him. “You should go. Now.”
And now she ordered him out? Like a servant? Tariq shifted his weight, balancing on the balls of his feet as if readying himself for combat, and idly imagined how he would make her pay for that slight. He was a king. She should learn how to address him properly. Perhaps on her knees, with that sinfully decadent mouth of hers wrapped around him, hot and wet. It would make a good start.
“If you won’t tell me what you want—” she began, frowning.
“You,” he said. He smiled. “I want you.”
CHAPTER TWO
“ME?” Jessa was taken aback. She would have stepped back, too, but she’d locked her knees into place and couldn’t move. “You’ve come here for me?”
She did not believe him. She couldn’t, not when his dark eyes still seemed laced with danger and that smile seemed to cut right through her. But there was a tiny, dismaying leap in the vicinity of her heart.
She could face the unwelcome possibility that she might still be a fool where this man was concerned, on a purely physical level. But she had absolutely no intention of giving in to it!
“Of course I am here for you,” he said, his eyes hot. One black eyebrow arched. “Did you imagine I happened by a letting agent’s in York by accident?”
“Five years ago you couldn’t get away from me fast enough,” Jessa pointed out. “Now, apparently, you have scoured the countryside to find me. You’ll forgive me if I can’t quite get my head around the dramatic change in your behavior.”
“You must have me confused with someone else,” Tariq said silkily. “You are the one who disappeared, Jessa. Not I.”
Jessa blinked at him. For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about, but then, of course, the past came rushing back. She had gone to the doctor’s for a routine physical, only to discover that she had been pregnant. Pregnant! She had had no illusions that Tariq would have welcomed the news. She had known he would not. She had needed to get away from him for a few days to pull herself together, to think what she might do while not under the spell his presence seemed to cast around her.
Perhaps she hadn’t phoned him. But she hadn’t left him.
“What are you talking about?” she asked now. “I was not the one who fled the country!”
His mouth tightened. “You said you were going to the doctor, and then you disappeared. You were gone for days, and then, yes, I left the country. If that is what you want to call it.”
